Haggadah Paasfeesverhaal Eerste Afrikaanse Vertaling (met Opmerkings). Text entirely in Afrikaans. Translated by Roman Egert.

(HAGADAH)

Va'ad Lisod Bet Sefer Yomi

Paarl, South Africa

1943

FIRST EDITION. Three illustrations.

Yaari 2307; Yerushalmi 195 (second edition only)

Printed to raise funds to launch a Hebrew Day School, this full text of the traditional Passover Hagadah contains no Hebrew at all but is exclusively in Afrikaans, the language of those parts of South Africa most strongly influenced by early Dutch settlement. The first ever translation of any specifically Jewish religious text into that language, it was produced in Paarl, the main city of the Western Cape, where even today only 5% of the population speak English. Even though Jewish mass-migration to South Africa, overwhelmingly from Lithuania and Latvia, took place during the period of British colonial rule, Yiddish speakers, settling in towns where Afrikaans was prevalent, often found themselves learning Afrikaans and not English as a second language. The result, Yiddish- and Afrikaans-speaking "Afrikaner Jews," or "Boere-Jode," was mainly a phenomenon of the immigrant generation, whose children learnt English at school. For more, see Charles Press, Light of Israel: The Story of the Paarl Jewish Community (1993)